Almost over it

George C. Scott (lighting a cigar): "My doctor allows me one of these a day.  This is my third!"--Taps

I'm almost over my cold.  Right now I have the song "Shaking the Blues Away" going through my head. (One of the That's Entertainment movies had a clip of Ann Miller singing it in Easter Parade.) Another earworm is "I Only Have Eyes for You" from Dames.

Yesterday our internet and cable TV connection went off for a whole day because of this storm that happened to the east over the weekend. (That's why it's been five days since my last entry here!) 

We finished the third season of Damages and will be seeing the fourth soon.  Last night we watched a DVD documentary about the magazine The Nation. (I read it faithfully in the '90s, back when they had Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn, but lately they've been playing it safe too often.) Tonight we saw part of a series about the history of documentary filmmaking.

Saturday I saw Taps with Dawna, the one where they're going to close down this military school but cadets led by Timothy Hutton grab the drill weapons and end up in a siege.  Well, I saw the first half anyhow.  It's the sort of movie where you know Tom Cruise is a psycho because of his extreme haircut and beret, and the plot requires general George C. Scott to forget that his sidearm still has a live round. (My cold didn't help either.)

My father told me the other week that his mother's father kept a book of Burns poems, the Bible and a bottle of whisky at his bedside.  But I was confused and thought he was referring to my mother's father!